The i2CAT Foundation participates in the AI&Big Data Congress with a presentation on detection and assistance of people with reduced mobility on public transport

16/10/2020

The AI&BigData Congress underlines that Artificial Intelligence is a competitive advantage for companies

The 6th edition of the AI&Big Data Congress was held on the 14th and 15th of October, focusing on the importance of early-adopting Artificial Intelligence to generate more companies and jobs. Artificial Intelligence will revolutionize the agricultural sector, energy, and sustainability, language, mobility, health, education, cultural industries, and the 4.0 Industry.

The Congress is a CIDAI initiative coordinated by Eurecat and sponsored by the Government of Catalonia, SDG Group, Microsoft, everis, and CaixaBank. Framed within the Catalonia.AI strategy of the Generalitat de Catalunya and coordinated by Eurecat, CIDAI is a public-private initiative that includes Barcelona City Council, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the Computer Vision Center, everis, the  i2CAT Foundation, Microsoft, and SDG Group. Its objectives are the generation, validation, and transfer of reliable Artificial Intelligence technologies with high added value to promote innovation in the country’s strategic sectors, including public services and the third sector, and the identification of technological proposals. innovators from leading research in Artificial Intelligence, to disseminate them to companies and institutions. 

Dr. Josep Escrig, director of the Distributed Intelligence Area of the i2CAT Foundation, presented a solution to improve the accessibility of people with reduced mobility in public transport. This project is a collaboration with Alstom. Public transport contemplates solutions for this problem in most scenarios, but the quality of the service and the agility in which it is launched still has much room for improvement. The present project implements a system of detection and position, by computer vision, of people with reduced mobility in the trains, and that next indicates to them and reserves automatically a space enabled of the wagon.

The field of Artificial Intelligence, in the words of Daniel Marco, who is the General Director of Innovation and Digital Economy at Government of Catalonia, “is perhaps one of the digital technologies that will have the greatest impact on companies, society, and territories”. Currently, Catalonia has 180 companies in this field, billing a total of 1.35 billion euros.